Into The Forge

Catch up on Season 1 of “Into the Forge” podcast before the Season 2 premiere in November!

In each of our podcasts, we ask top hardware entrepreneurs the same 10 questions to better understand the challenges and best practices in starting a hardware company. In Episode 7 of Season 1, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Dave Merrill, co-founder of Sifteo and Elroy Air, and Venture Partner at Lemnos.

Sifteo started at the MIT Media Lab. Jeevan and I reconnected there as graduate students. We recognized that we both shared this interest in how to make our interactions with information more effective and to evolve them past the current state-of-the-art interfaces. The idea for Sifteo cubes as a game system basically happened when we were deciding to start the company. The moment that we realized we were really on to something was when the talk that I gave at TED went on the Internet and just went wild. It was kind of a viral success before there was such a thing as Kickstarter. I would look at that talk going online as our equivalent Kickstarter moment, except that I wish I had a pre-order button next to it. I did not.

I’m a tool guy. I grew up watching my dad use woodcutting power tools like table saws and circular saws. When I was little, I played with a lot of what I now understand to be constructivist toys like Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys, and things where you were building complicated structures out of a lot of simple pieces. Before I went to college, I did a bunch of my own projects in the garage, kind of taking after my dad. For physics class, I built a model roller coaster that was awesome with a lot of hot glue and WeedWacker line.

I remember when we were designing cubes for the first time as a company I would spend some part of my day working on circuits, debugging and doing PCB layout, and some part of the day interacting with our industrial design firm. When you’re in the phase where you’re manufacturing, you get used to a mid-afternoon start to the communication with China, if you’re doing China-based manufacturing. By 3:00 p.m. or 4:00 p.m. we’d start to get some emails from our guys over there, and start to be available for whatever problem solving is going to be needed that day. Now, I may go to a meet-up and talk about Sifteo or speak on a panel or things like that just to keep the company out there in the public imagination. It’s hard to say what a typical day looks like because there are no typical days, really.

For me, it’s that transition that a lot of engineers in management go through. When you started, you loved to tinker and you spent all day building. As a founder, there’s so many things that require your attention, you probably are not going to get to spend much time, if any, actually getting your hands dirty with code or circuits. It’s navigating that transition of like, “Okay, so, how do I reallocate my time?” Then also, “How do I kind of reallocate my sense of satisfaction in what I’m doing every day?” If you’re a person that really loves making and building, as soon as you are a manager, it’s great because if you’re fortunate, like Jeevan and I have been, to be working alongside a super talented team of engineers and designers and customer support people, then all the sudden the capabilities of what

Catch up on Season 1 of “Into the Forge” podcast before the Season 2 premiere in November!

In each of our podcasts, we ask top hardware entrepreneurs the same 10 questions to better understand the challenges and best practices in starting a hardware company. In Episode 6 of Season 1, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with interviewing John Stanfield, the co-founder and CEO of Local Motion, which was acquired by Zipcar.

Clement and I co-founded Local Motion in 2010, just out of Stanford. I came out of a product design program there in the mechanical engineering group and Clement was MS&E (Management, Science, and Engineering). We had an idea to try and solve local mobility by building a four-wheeled plug-in electric vehicle that was designed from the ground up to share—something that was designed to be sold to places and not people and really focus on the local sharing of mobility. What we found after about two years was that our real true value in the marketplace was to offer that sharing ability to existing infrastructures. We separated the vehicle from a small piece of hardware and software platform that we now sell to large fleets across the United States and Europe.

I have a bit of a unique history. I studied Physics in undergrad and didn’t want to build bombs for the Navy. I continued doing my college job, which was wild firefighting. I did that for 12 years, rappelled down helicopters, sawed down trees on fire, and had a great time. But then, I came to Silicon Valley after starting a high-rise window cleaning service-based business in San Francisco, growing that to about 12 times its annual revenue, and selling it back to the original founder. I came down to Silicon Valley and got into Stanford for my graduate work and that’s where I met Clement.

I’ve always been an innovator, a creator, and a builder. I’ve always created things from furniture to two-wheeled electric vehicles in my garage. I started a vegetable oil conversion business in Los Angeles to take any diesel motor and allow it to run on waste vegetable oil. I invented some technology, started a company, and started realizing very quickly that the waste vegetable market is basically a commodities market and it’s very difficult to penetrate.

For me, right now, it’s all about just finding efficiencies and shifting between my multiple hats. Generally, in the morning, I come in and try to make sure there are no major problems with our existing platform. That’s checking in with the engineering teams that are working on customer satisfaction to backend software. I’m also basically the hiring manager, and I handle the finances, so I make sure that everything’s in order on the finance side. But the biggest part of my job right now is actually product development on our physical product, the user interface at the cars.

Hiring salespeople is the hardest thing that I have done to date. I would much rather solve a complex mechanism or a technical problem. I really had to learn how to hire sales and marketing people because I’ve never done it before. I had to create a way that I could look at sales roles and sales hiring from a technical perspective. We had to come up with a real, concrete solution-based set of questions

Catch up on Season 1 of “Into the Forge” podcast before the Season 2 premiere in November!

In each of our podcasts, we ask top hardware entrepreneurs the same 10 questions to better understand the challenges and best practices in starting a hardware company. In Episode 5 of Season 1, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Cheryl Kellond, founder and CEO of Bia, a former Lemnos portfolio company.

I am the classic late blooming adult-onset athlete. I was approaching my 40th birthday. I was in a rut, and a friend convinced me to do a triathlon. I had never run before. I barely swam before. I was not an athlete, but I fell in love with the sport. As I progressed in my abilities, I was looking for gear. I was looking for a training watch and an online training site that met my needs. I tried everything on the market and quickly came to the conclusion that they all sucked. They hurt my wrist to wear. They didn’t do what I needed. I mean, I’m an MIT grad, and when I have to crack open an instruction manual to learn a sports watch, you’ve got to be kidding me. I thought, “Gosh, we could solve this problem better.”

I had a marketing background. I clearly knew my target market. I have to say, even if I had been a long-term hardware person at a big company, I don’t think very much of that would have prepared me for what we had to go through as a new company.

I was the girl in high school that was really good at math and science, but at a certain point, it was more important for me to have a cute perm and go to the prom, so I didn’t pursue that in college like I should have. I kick myself for it because I’ve always been technically inclined. I pick it up really easily. There were times on this project when I wish I could have done more, but there are times that I impressed the hell out my team by learning stuff.

My day is a delicious blend of talking to VCs, negotiating home marketing deals, working with press and prominent athletes, and doing first line customer support. I get the hot swap list, so if anything is wrong in the field, I get it emailed to me. I print the shipping label, print the stamps.com label, and order the supplies from Uline. Then first round product testing on new features comes through me first because I’m the “athlete” on the team. If there’s a new pace smoothing algorithm, guess who’s got to get her butt out of bed and go do a six-mile run with three watches on her wrist?

The hardest part up until a few weeks ago was knowing that I made a commitment to these 2,500 customers that believed in us so deeply and spent their social capital and their money on us. Up until the moment it ships, you’re not really sure it’s going to ship. We had some big manufacturing problems as early as December, when we were like, “Oh, crap.” There’s that responsibility that I think weighs on you.

On the backend, now that we’re shipping, it’s just more expensive to make things better and fix problems—everything costs money. I can’t ship a product without paying for a mailing label. The financial hurdle is a little bit higher.

I was like, R

Catch up on Season 1 of “Into the Forge” podcast before the Season 2 premiere in November!

In each of our podcasts, we ask top hardware entrepreneurs the same 10 questions to better understand the challenges and best practices in starting a hardware company. In Episode 4 of Season 1, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Art Tkachenko, co-Founder of Pantry, a former Lemnos portfolio company.

I realized there was such a tremendous potential in RFID (radio frequency identification) and it was underutilized due to, I thought, an incorrect way of deploying the technology and taking advantage of the technology. At one point, in my free time, I came across an article saying that a big part of grocery sales for grocery stores comes from selling only 90 SKUs or 90 different products. While if you go to Safeway there’s 30,000 SKUs.

I thought, “Why can’t I just go to my lobby and get [my groceries]?” I live in an apartment complex in the city. It’s a very busy commute to get to any grocery store; it takes me half an hour. So I realized that this could be done and we could have food available at the places we spend most of our time, and done in a very elegant, user-friendly way.

I was focusing on wireless communication technologies as an undergrad. Before graduate school, I worked on interplanetary communication systems for satellites. In grad school, I studied cognitive radio. It was sort of wireless technology as well.

In the ’90s, in post-Soviet time, there were no toys in the Ukraine. So you built your own toys, you made your own fun. In high school, I was in robotics club, and we were building a lot of electronics systems. We didn’t have Digi-Key or anything like that. Definitely no Mouser. We had the electronics flea markets, where you could go and look at old PCB boards and try to scavenge old chips to use in your project.

We use a lot of help from Russia for our software development, so we actually work two or three shifts. We interact with Russian developers and software developers at night. Every time I come in the morning, the first thing I do is catch up with all the software team, see the progress that happened overnight. It gives everyone visibility of what’s happening in the company—even the people in Russia. I think that makes outsourcing so much better, when other people far away feel that they are part of the culture.

To have a narrow focus on exactly what needs to be done, what’s the best thing that could be done for the company. We get inquiries continuously. Narrowing the ones that are really important, the ones that need to be pursued, and being consistent on dropping the ones that are secondary are probably the hardest challenges. I don’t think I’ve got it figured out yet.

I don’t want to hide the fact that funding was an important part. Also it’s a validation that someone else believed in what you’re doing, and that’s quite important to the team. Being an entrepreneur, there are challenges on all fronts, and it’s smart to get as much help as you can. An incubator is a fantastic place to get a lot of meaningful feedback from people around you. It’s a comm

Catch up on Season 1 of “Into the Forge” podcast before the Season 2 premiere in November!

In each of our podcasts, we ask top hardware entrepreneurs the same 10 questions to better understand the challenges and best practices in starting a hardware company. In Episode 3 of Season 1, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Peter Platzer, the CEO of Spire, formerly NanoSatisfi.

I am a high energy and fusion physicist. I got really lucky in my youth. I got to spend some time at CERN and the Max Planck Institutes, and got to touch very, very large hardware. I was crawling through a fusion reactor at the Max Planck Institutes that I was writing my thesis on. It was an unparalleled inspirational experience.

And I always had this drive towards space, but it was, back then, too government-driven, so I followed my other passion, which was business, and joined the Boston Consulting Group. They then sent me to Harvard Business School, where I ended up starting a finance company—a quantitative training company. Then I ended up going back to International Space University in France and spent a year researching and studying anything about nanosatellites and the space industry, everything from the finance side, to the business side, to the legal side, which then culminated in a summer at NASA here in California, which then launched us into NanoSatisfi.

I mean, I’ve been tinkering with electronic circuitry and soldering since I was eight, nine, 10 years old; and I’ve been building those computers where I basically bought those components, figured them out, put them together so that I can compile faster. I basically always had the single fastest computer that you can build at any point in time.

More prominently early on, I had to drive almost every single process in the company. I was deeply involved in both the mechanical engineering parts, as well as the electrical engineering part, as well as the legal, business, and fundraising sides. Now my involvement is not as much in the day-to-day detail, but more in the higher level, steering and direction of the company. I’m more like a firefighter. For example, two days ago, they said, “Hey, Peter, we’re having a tough time getting a hold of vendor XYZ. You are our best enforcer, right? Can you give them a call?”

I think the hardest part of being a founder is dealing with people saying, “This is completely stupid. It will never work. It’s impossible.” If you’re a founder, it’s basically like disqualifying you as a person. And dealing with that, not taking it personally, and actually saying, “Okay, tell me why it is stupid.” I’ll ask the question seven times, “Why? Why? Why?” because nine out of 10 times, there is something that you can learn. It could be that you are presenting your idea the wrong way, that it is actually a wrong idea, or that you’re talking to the wrong people. Use it to your benefit, learn, and grow from it.

I mean, quite honestly, I think anyone who doesn’t choose accelerator is missing out. I think it’s 100% the correct way of building. For me, the people and the energy you surround yourself with are intricately linked to your success in wh

Catch up on Season 1 of “Into the Forge” podcast before the Season 2 premiere in November!

Into the Forge Podcast #2: Ilya Polyakov of Revolve Robotics

In each of our podcasts, we ask top hardware entrepreneurs the same 10 questions to better understand the challenges and best practices in starting a hardware company. In Episode 2 of Season 1, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Ilya Polyakov, co-founder and CTO of Revolve Robotics, a former portfolio company of Lemnos.

Being a long-time robotics guy, I really was against the idea of a non-roaming robot. I was convinced that this is a good idea when I was Skyping with my wife in New York. She was with my six-month-old baby, and we’re using a tablet. She’s fumbling with it, my daughter’s trying to eat the tablet, and that just doesn’t work. She needs to be able to get up, walk around with a baby, and I need to handle the aiming of the tablet. So originally, I made this thing for myself, but I figured if I need it, a lot of other people need it.

At the same time, as a company, we were working on a roaming telepresence robot. We saw a lot of crazy technical hurdles with that, like navigation and doors and Wi-Fi holes, and we were like, “What a minute, we can solve this problem with a stand.”

My history with robotics goes back to the mid-90s. I used to fight combat robots—first on “Robot Wars”, then “BattleBots”. Even back in high school, I started fighting robots and building robots. I did it all through college. Then I did industrial automation for a number of years, doing assembly robots and assembly cells for factories. That was my baptism by fire out of college. Then, I worked with my co-founder Marcus at our last startup for about seven years, developing electro active polymer, artificial muscle technology.

I have always been a maker. I got my soldering iron at age six. I grew up in communist Russia, before the collapse, where things were really shoddy. You held on to things and you patched them up. Cars would last 30 years because they just got to this permanent state of repair where you just kept it alive. That kind of maker culture, it was a survival thing.

One of the reasons I chose to do this is there is no such thing as a typical day. There are no set hours, because you’re always working. You’re always on email. I wake up in the morning, get on email, because the East Coast guy’s already sent you stuff, and you need to reply as soon as possible. One nice thing is we’re not working with China, so I don’t have to be up at three in the morning dealing with this.

Software. I’m a mechanical engineer by degree and I’m a designer kind of. I’m a hardware guy. Realistically, hardware nowadays is software wrapped in plastic. At Revolve, we have one person helping me on hardware and six contractors working on software. The software stuff has been really challenging, and navigating all the different ecosystems we have to operate within. We do web-ops, we do server ops, we do front-end web development, we do push notification, we work within iOS, and we do Bluetooth. There are just so many components outside of the actual hardware. By comparison, the hardware is the easy part.

Catch up on Season 1 of “Into the Forge” podcast before the Season 2 premiere in November!

Into the Forge Podcast #1: Chris Bruce of Sproutling

In each of our podcasts, we ask top hardware entrepreneurs the same 10 questions to better understand the challenges and best practices in starting a hardware company. In Episode 1 of Season 1, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Chris Bruce, the CEO of Sproutling, which was acquired by Mattel.

I feel like I worked on a lot of products that are sugar water, to use the phrase from Steve Job’s biography. I wanted to work on something that I care about. I wanted to work on something that I could spend 10-15 years at, building a big company. It’s a very passionate project and it has to do with kids, which I have two of, and I love them dearly. That’s pretty much why I decided to focus on products that help families have better, easier tech.

Before my last startup, which was a social gaming company, I worked with Shawn Fanning at Rupture, which got acquired by Electronic Arts. That was a great experience just from complete chaos to an organized company. I think it’s a great, great time to do startups and create value from nothing.

I’ve always been one of these clichés. I have been coding since I was nine. Even early on, when I was in seventh and eighth grade, I started into electronics and built stuff that annoyed my parents—alarms that wouldn’t turn off from my room, CBs, robots and stuff. But software has always stuck with me. I felt like early on, when computers were young and not many people knew how to work them, it felt like I was inventing.

Unfortunately, it’s a little bit different than I think traditional entrepreneurs, because I have two kids. I’ve been in startups before I had kids and then after. For me, it’s really a time shift. I think what I have learned now is that I have to be much smarter about my time, much more effective with what I do.

My typical day is early, like maybe 5:00 a.m., and I get a little work done, and then I see my kids in the morning, then I head off to the lab. Other times, I do a lot of meetings, unfortunately. When you’re a CEO of a company, it’s endless meetings. The best days are the days that my nose is to the grindstone, and I can just sit in front of the computer coding all day.

One of the hardest things is, with software, I can work all night and have something. I don’t need to rely on any outside vendor. The hard things are dealing with shipping, like this particular chip because I need a board assembled and that chip happens to not be available, but it’s going to be available soon, so getting that. I feel like I’m waiting on components and other things. In a perfect world, I’d be able to just push a button and print out a PCB board and then have all the stuff on it.

I’ve started a couple companies, and I think I have a pretty good network and a good skill set for starting a company. But hardware is different. There’s so many things I didn’t understand about delivering a consumer electronics device. How do you get it on the shelf, how do you get the thing manufactured, what is a contract manufacturer, wha

In each of our podcasts, we ask top hardware entrepreneurs the same 10 questions to better understand the challenges and best practices in starting a hardware company. In Episode 9 of Season 1, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Shireen Yates and Scott Sundvor of Nima, formerly 6SensorLabs, a Lemnos portfolio company.

Shireen: It really started with a personal issue of mine. I had suffered for a number of years from not being able to eat out without getting sick. I had severe food allergies, and gluten, specifically, was the most intense. I had always gone out, lived a pretty social life, and then I got diagnosed in college. It completely changed my life to lead a diet-restricted lifestyle. Once I found out what I was actually allergic to, it was very hard to avoid some of those foods while eating in social situations. So, I had this issue and put up with getting sick. I met a lot of people who also had the similar issues. Then I had the great privilege of meeting Scott at MIT, and we had a shared passion about helping people live healthier lives.

Scott: My education was in mechanical engineering. I think that definitely helped a lot. It gave me a great insight into the product development process. That’s something that they really drill into you at MIT. When I met Shireen, I was working in consulting after I got my mechanical engineering degree.

Shireen: I have a background in online sales and marketing—as far out as you can get from hardware. When Scott and I actually got together at MIT to start building this product, my expectations were absurd. Scott had a lot of education to do that summer, but I sat down with Scott and the engineering team at MIT and said, “Okay guys, we have four weeks to prototype, so I expect to have beta users at the end of these four weeks.” We had absolutely nothing at that time. It was just an idea, and our product is complicated.

Scott: It was a lot of fun working with those extreme expectations. It was also definitely a learning process for me. I thought things would go a lot more quickly, and cost a lot less money than you realize that they do. One of the great things about working with someone who is so far removed from hardware is that you have this constant tension. It really pushes the engineering team.

Shireen: I’m going to surprise you; I was a total maker. I remember in middle school, I took a straw, drilled a hole in my toothbrush, and filled it with toothpaste. Then I drilled a hole in the bristles. My mom was like, “You know, those toothbrushes exist.” But I was like, “No, look. I’ve, simplified it.”

Scott: I guess Shireen and I had similar childhoods, because I did a lot the same stuff. I think my first introduction to engineering was probably through Legos. I was always taking things apart. Before you had the remote controls for your light and your fan, I made a whole pulley system in my room for that. It progressed naturally to taking physics classes in high school, and then going to MIT and being a mechanical engineer.

Shireen: No day is the same. But, typically, we have a mix of making sure that we’re on track with our product development team and managing the schedule that we’ve built. The business development side is about 20 to 30 percent of the day—looking at the market, getting consumer feedback, looking at s

In each of our podcasts, we ask top hardware entrepreneurs the same 10 questions to better understand the challenges and best practices in starting a hardware company. In Episode 8 of Season 1, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Adam Ellsworth, founder of 8-Bit Lit.

About two years ago, a friend and I were discussing an idea for a touch-sensitive lamp for his two-year-old son. We came up with the idea of the question mark from Super Mario Bros. We made one for ourselves. We used TechShop, which has a lot of tools that you can prototype with: laser cutters, CNC mills, etc. We threw it up on Etsy, not really thinking much about it, but it got a ton of blog attention. We got a large number of orders right away. We made 1,000 of them at home in San Francisco, by hand, over three months. That actually turned out to be a helpful experience for production later because I really understood what it was like to set up a production line, to have to try to establish efficiencies, and to work through the line.

I did a program through Singularity University, and Autodesk, one of the big sponsors, had an innovation lab with a 3D printer. I actually designed an SU ring for the class, then printed it out and could wear it right away. That process of going from idea to creation was one of the first sparks that led me to this point.

Yes. I spent a lot of time at TechShop, which is a community workspace that’s like a gym. You pay a membership fee, but instead of barbells and machines, there are CNC mills, laser cutters, 3D printers, and prototyping tools to make a hardware product or furniture. There, I worked as a consultant for different startups, prototyping their hardware for them—just learning the tools day-by-day. Before that, I also built 3D printers for a company, and that was the first time I really honed my chops in the hardware world.

My days have been in waves. There are times when it’s just sprints all the time, and then there are lulls, when it’s like, okay, what’s the next step, what are the next stages?

A few months ago, my days were crazy because we decided to do all the fulfillment for our product ourselves. At this point, it’s in a bit of a lull, which is nice, but I also have to talk with the team in China. So most of my evenings between 6:00 and 8:00, or 9:00 and 11:00 are taken up with meetings.

The most difficult moment was actually launching the crowdfunding campaign because it was first time that I’d ever been responsible to thousands of people. It was higher stress than I had experienced before.

We ran a Kickstarter campaign because we realized our margins were just too low, with getting materials locally, going on Digi-Key, and also paying people a fair San Francisco salary. We couldn’t even offer wholesale because people were looking for 50% off, and we just couldn’t do it. So we decided to shut down and say we probably need to go to China or at least do a larger-scale manufacturing, which led us to Kickstarter. But even before Kickstarter, we started working with a manufacturer in China. We sent prototypes back and forth, so that by the time we actually launched, we were basically ready to go and all we needed was the money.

We also worked with a contract manufac

In each of our podcasts, we ask top hardware entrepreneurs the same 10 questions to better understand the challenges and best practices in starting a hardware company. In Episode 7 of Season 1, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Dave Merrill, co-founder of Sifteo and Elroy Air, and Venture Partner at Lemnos.

Sifteo started at the MIT Media Lab. Jeevan and I reconnected there as graduate students. We recognized that we both shared this interest in how to make our interactions with information more effective and to evolve them past the current state-of-the-art interfaces. The idea for Sifteo cubes as a game system basically happened when we were deciding to start the company. The moment that we realized we were really on to something was when the talk that I gave at TED went on the Internet and just went wild. It was kind of a viral success before there was such a thing as Kickstarter. I would look at that talk going online as our equivalent Kickstarter moment, except that I wish I had a pre-order button next to it. I did not.

I’m a tool guy. I grew up watching my dad use woodcutting power tools like table saws and circular saws. When I was little, I played with a lot of what I now understand to be constructivist toys like Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys, and things where you were building complicated structures out of a lot of simple pieces. Before I went to college, I did a bunch of my own projects in the garage, kind of taking after my dad. For physics class, I built a model roller coaster that was awesome with a lot of hot glue and WeedWacker line.

I remember when we were designing cubes for the first time as a company I would spend some part of my day working on circuits, debugging and doing PCB layout, and some part of the day interacting with our industrial design firm. When you’re in the phase where you’re manufacturing, you get used to a mid-afternoon start to the communication with China, if you’re doing China-based manufacturing. By 3:00 p.m. or 4:00 p.m. we’d start to get some emails from our guys over there, and start to be available for whatever problem solving is going to be needed that day. Now, I may go to a meet-up and talk about Sifteo or speak on a panel or things like that just to keep the company out there in the public imagination. It’s hard to say what a typical day looks like because there are no typical days, really.

For me, it’s that transition that a lot of engineers in management go through. When you started, you loved to tinker and you spent all day building. As a founder, there’s so many things that require your attention, you probably are not going to get to spend much time, if any, actually getting your hands dirty with code or circuits. It’s navigating that transition of like, “Okay, so, how do I reallocate my time?” Then also, “How do I kind of reallocate my sense of satisfaction in what I’m doing every day?” If you’re a person that really loves making and building, as soon as you are a manager, it’s great because if you’re fortunate, like Jeevan and I have been, to be working alongside a super talented team of engineers and designers and customer support people, then all the sudden the capabilities of what you can do have been amplified dramatically.

The momentum was not captured b